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Jem turned the page and was confronted with a photograph of the murder scene. He slammed the pamphlet shut, heart thudding.
The photograph didn’t show Toby, thank God; he couldn’t have borne the indecency. It was only the scene after the body had been removed. Even so, when he opened the pamphlet again, it was at the next page. He didn’t care what he might miss: he couldn’t look at that.
There was a summary of their movements after the row. Aaron and Ella had on their own account been together; everyone else had wandered around Oxford in miserable solitude, attracting no attention. Nicky had come back to college to borrow a book from his tutor, and Hugo to see Summoner’s Gift, as they had both freely admitted. Jem and Prue could very easily have been there, unnoticed.
Aaron had been arrested immediately, mostly on grounds of race, and freed very quickly when Ella intervened. The pamphlet was careful here, presumably with libel laws in mind. Nicky’s arrest had come a little later, probably when someone at college had presented him as pining, jealous, queer. They’d had to let him go too. There was no evidence at all.
The pamphlet moved on to the coroner’s inquest, with its verdict of murder by person or persons unknown. The coroner had speculated that a stranger might have entered the college during Summoner’s Gift for purposes of theft and murdered Toby when caught in the act. The pamphlet gave this short shrift, pointing out that this supposed sneak thief had ignored banknotes to the value of £40, jewelled cufflinks, and a gold watch, all left in plain view.Or are we to believe that the murderer was a passing homicidal maniac who seized upon this single undergraduate for no reason but to slake his bloodlust?
Jem didn’t think much of the passing-lunatic theory either, but it was all too obvious that the author’s objection had more to do with the shape of the story it created. A murder needed a villain, and a satisfactory denouement, and the author had evidently been determined to find a conclusion that would satisfy the reader while avoiding the laws of libel.
His solution, which Jem read with bewilderment and then anger, was Anglo-Saxon. The pamphlet concluded with a depiction of Nicky sitting alone in his digs on the night of the murder, translatingBeowulf. There was an artistic passage onone student writing in a dead tongue as another’s tongue was stilled for ever, and then a few lines:
The man’s mouth was silent. It spoke
No more, it had declared all it might disclose.
He would slumber in softness soon. His soul
Fled his flesh, and flew to glory.
An Anglo-Saxon quotation as the conclusion. No wonder the students believed they could call Nicky a murderer.
The pamphlet said it. Prue said it. Apparently, everyone felt able to say it, and spiky fear coalesced in Jem’s lungs as though he’d been running in the cold.
He headed back to college and Staircase Thirteen, from which an Indian man emerged wearing the browbeaten expression that Jem assumed to be common to all Nicky’s students. Jem let him pass and knocked, a double tap and then a third. It was the way he’d habitually knocked here a lifetime ago, and Nicky opened the door with a smile already dawning.
‘Jeremy.’ He stepped back to let Jem in. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would return.’
‘I need to talk to you. In private. Can we?—?’
Nicky moved to lock the door, then stepped over to the shutters and closed them. There was already a lamp burning, since the ground floor windows let in little light at this time of year, and he went over to turn up the gas. It was suddenly rather close, as intimate as their dinner had been last night, or their evenings a decade ago before someone had put a knife in Toby’s heart.
Someone. Maybe Nicky.
He was locked in a room with a man who might be a murderer, who might resort to anything to conceal his crime. Too many people had implied or said freely that they thought Nicky had done it; Jem couldn’t in truth have said,I don’t believe it was you. What he did believe, somehow, was that Nicky wouldn’t hurt him.
No. That wasn’t right, because Nicky had hurt him badly, before. What he believed, the reason he was here now, was that if Nicky would kill him to protect himself, then the world was too bleak to be borne.
He swallowed. ‘Listen?—’
‘Me first,’ Nicky said. ‘Are you going to tell me you’ve changed your mind about looking into this?’
‘No.’
‘Then I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want you to do this. It’s a mistake, and it might be a dangerous one.’
‘Aaron said that.’
‘Aaron is a bright man. Look, you know as well as anyone what Toby was capable of. He let the others know you’re queer for no better reason than spite, and I’d wager none of them had realised till then. He was waving a threat of two years with hard and personal ignominy in your face—Jem?’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’ Jem felt a little dizzy. ‘I didn’t expect you to say that.’
Nicky looked, for once a little unsure. ‘I assumed your tastes hadn’t changed since college. Am I wrong?’
‘No. No, you—I’m sorry. Only I’ve never really had anyone say that to me, that’s all. It just sounded a little…’ The simple word out loud, applied as a description and not an insult. It had seemed to shake everything like the beads of a kaleidoscope and make it all settle in different patterns.
‘Ah,’ Nicky said. ‘Still innocent?’
